Books Reading the Weird The Yolk’s on You: Carmen Maria Machado’s “Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa” “An egg is the most dangerous thing in the world.” By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on March 11, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Carmen Maria Machado’s “Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa,” first published in Lightspeed in April 2014., and collected in John Joseph Adams’ Futures & Fantasies. Spoilers ahead—but it’s short and it’s good and you should go read it. 1. [The man sitting next to the Trapped Woman opens with:] This cabin’s so hot I could hardboil an egg in my mouth. What’s your name? 2. If you watch the whirling egg cook, a golden hemisphere in a corona of white, you’ll see what only a god might see. You (not you personally, now that you know the secret) become a god for a couple seconds and create a new world somewhere in existence. You’ll received prayers from your frightened worshippers via cryptic notes and misheard colleagues. It’s terrible to be a god. I don’t recommend it. 3. If you freeze an egg, the shell will pop off like a bottlecap, and the insides will lie in your hand like a stone. In some countries, you can trade such yolks for necessities. Rumor (inaccurate) has it that planting a frozen yolk will cause something better than potatoes to grow. 4. If you look inside an egg you’ve just cracked, you may see reflected another kitchen, another face from someone else who has cracked and looked inside the same egg, could be in Brooklyn or an alternative universe. 5. woman I once dated thought you cut cows open to get milk. How silly. You can cut eggs out of a chicken, clean off the blood and feathers, and they’re good to go. 6. “An egg is the most dangerous thing in the world.” 7. Farmer’s market eggs sometimes open to drop a fetal dragon into your pan. Don’t try to incubate the other eggs to hatching. All the babies will be dead in the shell. That’s fine, dragons will always turn on you in the end. 8. Hermann Hesse on eggs: “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.” Hesse isn’t writing figuratively, and he’s a bastard. 9. How many eggs have you eaten in your life? A thousand? All those chickens are now inside you, their potential thoughts and dreams, their lives and deaths. “In a way, I think, we’re all a thousand chickens.” 10. It’s pleasant to take an egg and splat it down on a hard surface with all your might. In some villages it’s a competitive pastime. 11. I’m sure the flight attendant does have some eggs in back, but she’s saving them for First Class. You were smart to bring your own eggs in that lunchbox. 12. Patsy Cline believed that all the parallel universes touched each other in the wet places of the world. She died in a plane crash, but not a plane like ours. A small one. 13. I know you. We shared an egg once. You won’t remember because it was your first time egg-side. I thought you were so beautiful. I’m disappointed to see you looking angry. Smile. 14. [The flight attendant intervenes.] It’s all right, Miss. I’m sure she didn’t mean to throw that egg at me, I don’t need to change my seat. Ha-ha! 15. [In conclusion, maybe.] “That hardboiled egg looks delicious.” I’d like a bite. The Degenerate Dutch: You can’t even call the flight attendant a “stewardess” these days. Whatever are you supposed to say, when you can’t say that? Libronomicon: The universes you’ve accidentally created communicate through scraps of found paper, and mysteriously appearing Word documents. Weirdbuilding: Patsy Cline did not, unless I’ve failed my websearch, have a theory about parallel universes. But Brian May was part of NASA’s New Horizons team and Natalie Portman is a neuroscientist. And Patsy Cline’s voice, in an alternate universe, has been to Mars. (If this really happened in our own universe, I can’t find documentation. Perhaps it’s an uncollapsed waveform.) Ruthanna’s Commentary Someone asked me about Carmen Maria Machado’s writing, and I picked this for an illustrative example. Specifically, they wanted to know if she writes realistic near-future science fiction. Listen. Listen. This story could happen tomorrow. It involves a plane, which is totally science, and mentions parallel universes, which are almost as clear a genre signal as rocket ships. Of course, it also mentions dragons. Perhaps the best genre parallel is Larry Niven’s “For a Foggy Night,” which as best I can recall frames most of the speculative elements in an uncomfortable conversation with some random guy in a bar. There might be actual dimensional travel at the end—listen, I haven’t actually reread any Niven since I got exasperated with Footfall early in the century, and I have fond memories of this story, don’t make me ruin them. Anyway, the difference between a bar and an airplane is that you can walk out of a bar. Into another universe sometimes, but probably with survivable temperature and air pressure. You can even just switch barstools. Plus you’ve probably been drinking, at better prices than an airline’s, which makes every companion in not-entirely-consensual conversation seem cleverer and more welcome. (See for evidence Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Bar series, which I read around the same time period as I was reading Niven. I still wake up sometimes shouting, “Toony is a perfectly reasonable nickname! Don’t marry the incel cyborg! No one else wants to pee in the sink, you’re just tall!”) Where was I? My point, I swear I had one, was that “guy in the middle seat who won’t stop talking” is a perfectly plausible future event. And yet, the genre boundaries waver like uncooked egg white. The dragons get into rocket ships and the ships grow tentacles. A guy can violate your personal space, the rules about things you say to strangers, and your sense of reality all at the same time. Herman Hesse says that who would be born must first destroy the world, and that the world is an egg. Or at least, he says that the egg is the world, which implies the commutative. The Ohtori Academy student council says “Smash the world’s shell, for the revolution of the world!” The asshole in the seat next to you says that Herman Hesse was a bastard, which was certainly also true of the student council. But maybe the world is full of bastards trying to crack it and be reborn as airplane creepers. Maybe they are succeeding, all the time. Maybe that’s how we got to this reality in the first place. Perhaps when we land, more shells will have cracked and we’ll find ourselves in yet a different one. Perhaps if you crack an egg yourself—say, over this guy’s head—we’ll find ourselves in a better one. Every time you talk with a stranger, there’s risk. They may know something you didn’t know, or believe something you didn’t think anyone believed. They may have experiences that break your assumptions about how people act, and what kinds of fixes to the world’s problems could work at all. This can be valuable—but it’s also true that some strangers really are deeply incorrect, or deeply unpleasant, or both. You want to have an out. Yesterday on the train home from Amsterdam, I heard a cellist talking to her friend. An American man had started telling her all about his pets, and this felt to her like an unusual level of “opening up.” She thought he was offering a more intimate relationship; he was just the kind of guy who cheerfully blabs about his life. Or maybe Americans are just like that? (I was tempted, illustratively, to intervene and admit that yes, we kind of are.) It’s an awkward ambivalence. If you tell strangers about your life, they may not understand your intent or appreciate your confidences. But if you never talk about your pets, or your attempt to hatch a dragon army, you will never be known. After a few rounds of rebirth, when you already know everyone—for definitions of “know” that have nothing to do with their personal boundaries or comfort with sexism—it’s tough. I very nearly sympathize. But maybe try it at the bar, rather than mid-flight. And not with me. Anne’s Commentary My first thought on seeing the title of this story was: EGGS ON A PLANE. Slither the hell out of my cockpit, you sorry excuses for CGI that are the Snakes on a Plane ophidians. You make the Anaconda movies look like models of herpetological accuracy. Besides, as Machado’s seatmate from hell declares: An egg is the most dangerous thing in the universe. It’s the ultimate emblem for potential, and the egg’s potential can range from breakfast to dragons to xenomorphs with multiple jaws, maybe even to whole new worlds, somewhere out there, for good or more likely for just one more set of people who pray to an unresponsive god, and what universe needs that? Planes, trains, buses, boats, whatever the vehicle of mass transport may be: It should come with Interaction and No Interaction sections, the rules strictly enforced by burly attendants, or maybe by electric shock emitters in the seat cushions. Or tranquilizer darts embedded in the same. Let the offensive passengers drift off and quietly dream about their obsessions instead of inflicting them on the innocent. Enough with the curmudgeonly venting. Listening to your random seatmates in life can be an act of kindness, of compassion, of contrition for earlier sins of turning away. This poor old guy, he may have no one else to talk to but the stranger temporarily stranded with him for whatever reason. Smile, nod, drop in the occasional “mm-hmm” or “I see.” For extra karma points, ask a pertinent question or two. As Machado says in the Author Spotlight linked to “Observations,” she’s “had to spend many hours at the mercy of people exactly like [her egg-expert character.] Planes are interesting and terrifying like that.” Mr. Egg-Expert is both interesting and, if not terrifying, at least unnerving; the stuff about cutting chickens open for their eggs and competitive egg-splatting are a bit on the far side of enough, while the man’s claim that he knows his listener from that time they shared the same egg before she was born, that’s getting creepy. No wonder that hardboiled egg “accidentally” slipped out of TW’s hands and landed on the old guy. But maybe we can’t call writers complete innocents in such situations. Again in the Author Spotlight, Machado describes imagining that her listener character is jotting down the old man’s comments—hence the list structure of the story. Asked what she would do if she was actually stuck next to such a seatmate, Machado responds that she’d “listen long enough to get a good story to tell later, and then pull out a book.” I guess you could call that a predatory interaction, or at least a commensal one. That’s unless the old man belatedly realizes Observation #13 is stalky enough to merit the retaliation of a thrown egg. From his exchange with the flight attendant, it seems that he might, making the passengers’ encounter mutually beneficial on the whole. Or… We can read the Egg-Expert as someone more sinister than a garrulous senior with a touch of disinhibition. “Observations” reminds me so much of another story we’ve discussed: Shirley Jackson’s “The Witch.” Four-year-old Johnny is riding on a train with his mother and baby sister. He comments on everything he sees from the window, progressing from cows and bridges to “a bad, old, mean witch” intent on eating him, whom he’s chased away. Mom, who is reading, responds calmly, “Fine.” An elderly man, white-haired and pleasant-faced, enters their coach and strikes up a conversation with Johnny that starts out innocuous, then abruptly shifts into a story about the old man’s little sister, just like Johnny’s, whom he loved so much he bought her a rocking-horse and a doll and a million lollipops, and then he strangled and dismembered her and put her head into a cage for a bear to eat. Mom is horrified, especially when Johnny reacts with laughing enthusiasm and suggests they cut his mommy’s head off, or, alternatively, that his mommy eat up the old man. Mom orders the old man to get out of their coach and he retires, still laughing. Mom knows she should say something to counteract the old man’s malice; the best she can think to do is give Johnny a lollipop and insist the man was just teasing. Probably, Johnny allows, but adds that probably the old man was a witch. What if the old man on the plane is also a witch, determined to plant seeds (eggs!) of disquiet in his seatmate’s mind. To rattle her worldview out of whack. To shiver her faith, out of sheer random spite. Or what if their meeting isn’t random, because the old man (wizard, demon) really has met her before, her twin in a double-yolked egg? Easy enough to dismiss the Egg-Expert as demented, deluded, tiresome but not a serious threat. You never do know, though, do you, about random encounters on a plane? Forget about trusting in the kindness of strangers. Even trusting in their harmlessness may be unwise “in a world with eggs, which give us life, and have so many uses besides.” Them’s my paranoid italics, not Machado’s. Next week, we continue to track the fate of the dead in Chapters 5-6 of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.[end-mark] The post The Yolk’s on You: Carmen Maria Machado’s “Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa” appeared first on Reactor.